After finishing the work on the third and originally final entry in the Ace Attorney series, Shu Takumi, the creative lead behind those games, wanted to do something similar but fresh. Which ended up becoming Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective for Nintendo DS in 2010. Unlike the Ace Attorney games, this title was more of a puzzle focused adventure game, where you are a spirit, who can perform the titular “ghost tricks” when possessing different items on the screen to solve problems. And instead of unearthing or solving crime you were often focusing on preventing it by having an ability to possess a recently deceased person and go 4 minutes before their death to attempt and prevent it from happening in the first place.
The game was very well received critically, but had poor sales, according to Capcom themselves, and soon after Shu Takumi returned to work on more Ace Attorney games. Luckily, the game wasn’t forgotten and we now have a new version of it adapted for modern platforms, running on RE Engine (as it’s now the main engine Capcom builds their projects on) and with a couple of neat improvements. And it’s great.
As already described, the game works as a puzzle-centric adventure. You can play around possessing different items on the scene and exploring options and visit different non-mandatory locations to see some additional bits of the story, but in each of the game’s Chapters you have a certain problem that you must solve. And the solution of that problem is the puzzle for you to figure out, as there’s only one way to do it. When inside the 4 minute before death parts of the game, you are more limited in options and the game expects you to fail a few times, since some of the options you will try are dead ends, and some of those dead ends completely block the solution of the puzzle. To unblock, you can restart the whole segment from the beginning or, if you’ve progressed far in longer segments, from a checkpoint.
And frankly, this is the only truly frustrating bit of the game. A lot of the solutions are meant to be trial and error and in a lot of the cases that doesn’t lead to a permanent block of the solution within a try. However, in the parts where it does block you entirely, you have to restart, then slowly fast forward through sections that can be fast forwarded (and not all of them are), then redo everything up until the block and try something else. And if that something else also fails, you have to repeat the process again. Which can be even more so frustrating in puzzles, where you need to just wait for an extended period of time before something happens to even attempt again. I really wish the game had a realtime rewind instead or at least a full skip of mini-cutscenes of “oh this could be useful” that trigger every time you replay the puzzle.
Thankfully, the moments where this becomes infuriating are extremely rare, with only about 3 Chapters in the game being unpleasant to puzzle through, with the vast majority of the game being extremely fun and playful. Helped by the fact that the writing, the characters, the style, the scenarios and the music are all fantastic. It is ridiculous, as one would expect if you’ve ever played Ace Attorney, but unlike those titles, the characters in Ghost Trick are consistently likeable, even when they are “slow” or too much of a stereotype. They’re really good and their shtick manages to not get old through the course of the game.
Speaking of music and visuals – the game looks and sounds great on modern hardware. Music has been updated and sounds richer, while retaining the mood of the original tracks (and you can use the old DS soundtrack as well if you wish). And visuals just look gorgeous and it’s often easy to forget what parts are supposed to be real time 3D, and what is just 2D background. The game does keep its original 4:3 aspect ratio, so instead you can use different borders from the Options. And since the original game utilized the dual screens of Nintendo DS only for very few cute transitions, you’re not even missing anything important in the transition to the one screen gameplay. One aspect that is notably worsened, though, is that travel cutscene, it being a loading screen, visibly lags horribly, whereas it was more smooth in the original version of the game. But it’s very minor and hardly affects the overall experience.
I loved playing Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, even if some parts of the game were frustrating. Which is highly contrasted to the original Ace Attorney trilogy (and my attempts at playing The Great Ace Attorney), where I was often bored or frustrated by its design. It’s a really fun and often funny experience that I could easily recommend to anyone who loves puzzle focused adventure games with a good (if over the top) story.